Sunday, 7 September 2014

-Music Videos on my Mind- Yann Tiersen’s “Meteorites”

Yann Tiersen was up until now a name that appeared on movie credits for music by. It turns out he’s actually a French indie pop star with eight studio albums under his belt, and it appears that European directors wholesale lift songs from his albums because his sound is impressively cinematic. For example, the music used on Amélie pretty much consists of tunes pilfered from Tiersen’s first four albums.

Tiersen thinks in cinema. Everything about Meteorites speaks film, from a poetic recitation of what feels like a movie pitch, to the finale of 1950s B-movie theremins that brings it all back to ground. The song lives and breathes through Aidan Moffat’s brogue Scottish narration, who himself is the lead singer in Arab Strap, imbuing the vocals with a baritone dreaminess that takes the listener by the hand and whisks them on an exquisite voyage of ethereal loveliness.

Meteorites is a song of cosmic enchantment: building from small tender beginnings, flourishing into a sensual midpoint, only to then fade into a miasma of spooky exhaustion.

It’s the kind of song that is so epic in scale it seems a poor choice to have commissioned a music video which is so stiff and confined. It’s distracting to have French fashion model Clémence Poésy ineffectively mouth Moffat’s words. It proves distracting, whereas just to close one’s eyes and go on Moffat’s journey suffices.